Giorgio Valla and the mathematical books of the De expetendis rebus

27 marzo 2008

In the following sections an OWL ontology of the encyclopedia written by Giorgio Valla is presented (1447-1501).

A modeling, from a semantic point of view, of the knowledge domain that Valla has used to compose the De expetendis rebus is proposed. This includes both the classical sources Valla has made use of -- i.e. the ones that we have been able to found inside the mathematical books of his encyclopedia-- both the more generic knowledge domain of De expetendis rebus mathematical books -- i.e. all the information related to treated topics, cited authors and fortune we have been able to extrapolate and translate into a computer language. The semantic transposition allows us to focus our attention on concepts, to understand the relationship between them and to find what objects belong to which concepts. For what concern the conceptual representation we will make use of an ontology, i.e. an object-oriented database similar to an easily extendible semantic web based net. The original goal of this chapter was to develop a basic ontology of the De expetendis et fugiendis rebus but we have ended with a more extended one. Thus our ontology is not only including all the possible information related to the De expetendis rebus and its sources, but at the same time a lot of information on other mathematical authors. In other words we can classify it as an ontology of the ``mathematical knowledge'' from the ancient times up to the XVI century.

As everybody can imagine it has not been an easy task to accomplish given the huge amount of information that should be acquired, the many issues related to them and to the evolution of the ontology itself. However our goal has been achieved for what concern the Vallian related part and exhaustive for what concern the wider mathematical history part related to Giorgio Valla's books. Instead it should be completed for what concern all the other mathematical aspects. We believe that due to the current ontology structure, it will be possible to extend if without the need of adding more classes or relationship between them.

The tool used to develop our ontology is Protègè-OWL. A possible approach to create a database using an existing client-server DBMS (Database management system) has been discarded because it does not fit all our requirements. A knowledge database provided in the form of an OWL ontology is easily accessible from everybody through the web and can be modified and extended. With a traditional database approach the sharing of the knowledge base we have developed would have been limited or quite null.

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